“We welcomed the announcement of the agreement between the Sacro Cuore Foundation and the Municipality of Cesena for the construction of a new car park in the area of via Padre Vicinio da Sarsina. The news, however, inevitably leads us to formulate some considerations. The first is that, after five years of melina, at the last mile, the municipal administration is breathlessly constructing that car park in the historic center that it had promised in its 2019 electoral programme”. The speaker is Luigi Di Placido (municipal councilor of the list civic Let’s change)
“The second consideration is that the 60 parking spaces that will result are not bad, but they do not equal those that were present in Piazza della Libertà either. And this means that, however important, this new work will not solve the problem of parking in the center And, in fact, even the mayor is aware of it: yesterday in his illustration he informed us that he also aims to increase the use of the Mattarella car park and that he also intends to increase the use of the car park at the Caps in Via IV Novembre by 50 percent. This further confirms that, after having denied this critical issue for years, now also the municipal administration, having responded to our appeals, albeit with a guilty delay, has finally noticed the problem we, in the past the representatives of the forces that today find themselves allied with the mayor had also intervened several times”.
“With regards to the Caps car park in Via IV Novembre, many years ago one of the agreements with the then car park concessionaire, in order to avoid a dispute, was a monetary compensation but also a compensation that would have been paid to the manager in the event that that car park had not achieved the objectives set in the agreed financial plan. So, for years the Municipality of Cesena has paid for the unuse of that car park without doing anything to make things change. This is why we welcome the idea today to implement it, but we cannot help but underline that this choice arrives dramatically late”.
“But we cannot talk about the historic center, as the mayor did a few weeks ago during the presentation of the lists that support it, only because of the insertion of retractable anchors which will lead to its total pedestrianization. A hypothesis on which we are not prejudiced against, but which must necessarily be subordinated to a broader road plan that guarantees, first and foremost, its complete usability. The difficulty of reaching the historic center has not, in recent years, been a fairy tale told by minorities, but the harsh reality. which many businesses have had to deal with every day and which ended up in crisis for this very reason” Di Placido said again.
“Those who say that the historic center is condemned to its fate due to the changed habits of consumers actually forget that, in many municipalities of Romagna, there are historic centers that function very well. And that, not surprisingly, long before Cesena , have launched intelligent parking policies and incentive campaigns to enrich them. Ultimately, the Municipality’s new projects are not enough to solve the problem of the historic center of Cesena which, as explained, would need a much broader and more strategic relaunch plan. It is positive that the administration finally admits the problem, but no one will give us back the years lost between errors, ambiguities and continuous postponements”.
